"You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

The Ferris Wheel speech from The Third Man still makes me laugh. Though we know of course that it isn't true. In fact it's wrong in almost every utterance about the Swiss: between the original foundation of the Swiss Confederation in 1292 and the invasion by Napoleon almost exactly 506 years later, the Swiss fought many battles and acquired a reputation as fierce, for a while almost unconquerable, mercenaries. They also didn't invent the cuckoo clock. Like so many other ills, that was inflicted on the world by the Germans...

Since Orson Welles so brazenly dismissed the Swiss though, they have given us many wonders: the Swatch watch, a home for CERN where Tim Berners-Lee invented the worldwide web and Prof Higgs's Boson was discovered, and of course the unreconstructed marvel that is Roger Federer.

What else is there to celebrate about Switzerland? (I think we can take chocolate and watches as read...)

(And a disclosure: I was born in Manchester into a Swiss family and grew up there - I even went to the same school as Federer!- so I'm not quite as neutral in this as at first glance I might seem...)

Well done Federer the best man won ... But forgive me for hating you slightly for beating Britains Best Hope in 76 Years !

Andy Murray will do it Eventually ... Well done Both players !

I feel for you as much as I feel with you. Being both British and Swiss my loyalties yesterday were seriously divided.

But I agree: the best man won and they were both so gracious in victory and in defeat respectively that you can only wish them both the best for their future, which, in Andy Murray's case, I think has massive potential yet... (just hope the Scots won't quit the Union before he actually wins it, otherwise we have ourselves a whole new 'situation'...)